Dungeon Explorer

published by author in 1990, running on MS-DOS

type: role-play
genre: Fantasy
perspective: bird's-eye
player options: single player

other: Shareware
languages: eng

Official description

Dungeon Explorer is a graphical role playing game. You create a character, buy equipment and explore a dungeon or ruin. You must defeat whatever monsters you encounter to gain experience and wealth, causing your character to become more powerful and stronger.

But unlike most RPGs, Dungeon Explorer allows you to play a variety of different adventures using the same game. Each adventure is stored separately and as time passes, more adventures can be added and played without having to upgrade the basic program. Dungeon Explorer comes with a mini-adventure called Dungeon of the Beast which contains 64 rooms to explore (full adventures have 128 rooms). You may copy it freely and are encouraged to give copies away. In this way you can try out Dungeon Explorer for free and if you enjoy the game, you can order some of the other full size adventures.

You begin the game by selecting the desired adventure from the ones available to you. Then you must select the character to play. To create a new character, you merely supply the name of one that does not exist. The game will create the character and play will begin.

Once you have a character, the first order of business is to equip the character with armor, weapons and other handy items. Since your starting funds are limited, you must begin the adventure to find gold and gain experience fighting monsters. With additional funds you can buy healing and better weapons, which allow you to explore further and further. As you progress you will find a number of puzzles and devious traps. Not to fear. You may save your character to disk at any time and in case of an untimely death, you can restart your character where he was last saved.

Overall, the purpose of this game is to have fun. The game plays in either 4 color CGA or 16 color EGA graphics and there are plenty of puzzles to keep you busy. And or course, a variety of colorful monsters to hack and slash. The only real goal of the game is to explore every room of the adventure and return alive.